Network digital video recorders (nDVR), network personal video recorders (nPVR), remote storage digital video recorder (rs-DVR), and like equipment are network-based digital video recorders that may be stored or located on the cloud at a server location or at a content provider's location rather than at a consumer's private location or home. Such network devices have effectively increased the consumer's ability to time shift the consumption of programs (i.e., to record, download, or stream a program and ultimately consume the program or parts thereof at a later time that best suits the consumer). This ability to time shift also provides the consumer with enhanced power to consume only selected portions of programs by, for example, skipping or fast-forwarding through portions of recorded content, and also to consume parts of a program multiple times via use of rewinding or the like.
In an nDVR or time-shifted content delivery system, video content available for playback may be recorded, transcoded, and stored in several video formats. Typically, each format consists of a different video resolution and bitrate, to enable adaptive bitrate streaming. The multiplicity of different stream formats and bit rates enables the content to be sourced to devices with different capabilities, such as high definition televisions of wide ranging sizes, personal computers, tablet computers, smart phones, and other client devices. In addition, the different bit rates support adaptive streaming, whereby the receiving client has the ability to measure network congestion and request a lower or higher bit rate stream from the source which may eliminate visual impairments caused by network congestion (e.g. macro-blocking due to dropped packets, frozen frames) at the expense of higher resolution video.
Automatic segment detection and replacement procedures often result in imprecise insertion in such video delivery environments. The imprecision consists of a misalignment of an inserted video clip with the group of pictures (GOP) or chunk boundary. In the case where the segments are ad avails (i.e., advertising availabilities), solutions exist to align a video clip to a chunk boundary of a video asset if there are SCTE-35 markers present. SCTE-35 refers to a standard of the Society of Cable and Telecommunications Engineers that describes inline insertion of cue tones in MPEG-TS streams. However, not all advertisements carry SCTE-35 markers. Furthermore, non-broadcast solutions, such as provided by on-demand or over-the-top video content delivery types, frequently utilized by Multiple System Operators (MSOs) may not carry SCTE-35 markers and may thereby affect the precision of advertisement insertion. Still further, SCTE-35 markers will not be available in the case where segments being replaced are not ad avails, for instance, in the automatic creation of sports highlights, news reels, user-requested content summaries, or the like.